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The Defections of Dr. John

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The Defections of Dr. John The Defections of Dr. John APPROVED FOR RELEASE CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM 18 SEPT 95 SECRET A once sensational and mysterious intelligence betrayal is examined in the perspective of time for motivation and key circumstances. Delmege Trimble Rain streaked the streets of Berlin, splashed on darkened houses, glistened in the light from an East-West border checkpoint. A sedan rolled up, its tires singing on the wet pavement. A customs guard sauntered out. For a moment there was only the throb of the engine, a murmur of conversation, the rhythmic click of the windshield wipers. Then the wave of a hand, and the car rolled across the Sandkrug Bridge into the darkness of East Berlin. A simple incident on this warm, wet night of 20 July 1954, the decennial of a more famous 20 July. Simple, but so fraught with significance for Germany and the West that Chancellor Adenauer called it "terrifying." Dr. Otto John, president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, had defected. He was the most important Westerner fallen into Communist hands since the two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, had vanished from London in 1951, and far more important than they in point of implications for intelligence. The puzzle was--and to some still is--the reason why, the causes behind the eastward flight of the Federal Republic's internal security chief in the company of a trumpet-playing gynecologist, a Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth. The contemporary explanations ranged the spectrum. The easiest one, that Wohlgemuth was a Soviet agent who had druged John and abducted him, foundered on facts that gradually came to light. Some said that John, a mixed-up idealist, had been spurred across the border d-up ide en sp by a misguided concept of political morality. Some regarded him as a victim of machinations on the part of the neo-Nazis and clerical and other reactionary circles around Chancellor Adenauer. His flight was pictured by others as that of a desperate man whose past was about to catch up with him. Yet others called him a long-time traitor and informer, even a secret Communist fanatic. There were prejudicial grounds for some of the least pretty interpretations. John's weaknesses for alcohol and the opposite sex were well known, his favorite sport when pixilated being to snap the elastic of women's brassieres. It was persistently rumored that he was a double agent or a homosexual, and he certainly had an affinity for too many characters with one or both of these qualifications. Aside from his companion Wohlgemuth, who had connections with the East Berlin Charité Hospital and made no secret of his Communist sympathies, John was on good terms with Soviet agent Max Wonsig, blown at the Willi Kucher spy trial, and more notably with one Baron Wolfgang Gans Edler Herr von und zu Putlitz. Von und zu Putlitz had been a prewar British agent in the Nazi Foreign Office, whisked to the safety of England in 1938; subsequently he worked in the United States for OWI until he was fired and his valet had to support him by tending bar; later he returned to British employ in Germany; and in 1950 he started working for the Communists in East Berlin. Yet the stereotype of the weak man made vulnerable by his lusts or corrupted by bad company is not one that fits the Otto John picture. And all the other theses, each arguable, strike only tangentially at the truth. Erich Ollenhauer may have come closer when he remarked, after John redefected and began to show increasing signs of a persecution and Messiah complex, "This is a case for the psychiatrists rather than the politicians." We cannot even now arrive at anything like a tidy analysis of the case, but we can achieve some understanding of it by tracing John's propensities during the Nazi and Nuremberg eras, reviewing the circumstances of his unlikely appointment and ineffectual tenure as president of the Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz, and examining in detail his behavior just before and after his defection on that 1954 anniversary of the unsuccessful 20 July anti-Hitler coup.1 Role in the Anti-Nazi Underground Otto John was born in 1909. Two friendships from his early life remained of importance in his adult career and were to play a part in the events of July 1954. During his school days at Wiesbaden in the mid-twenties he became a close chum of Wolfgang Hoefer, son of the school principal. The intensity of German schoolboy friendships is reflected in the eventual tragedy that flowered from this early acquaintance. Hoefer, whose mother was Jewish, emigrated to the United States in the late 1930's. He changed his name to Hoffer, became a U.S. citizen and a soldier. In 1945 he was sent to Germany and renewed his friendship with Otto John. In 1954, upon John's defection, he committed suicide. An emotionally more important relationship for Otto was that with his brother Hans, another marked for tragedy. Hans, the younger, brighter, and sturdier, was the extrovert doer, Otto the troubled dreamer. Otto felt no fraternal jealousy; he adored the younger brother who, as long as he lived, supplied the balance Otto needed. Hans was to be tortured to death in the aftermath of the abortive July 1944 coup. Otto studied for a career in the foreign service, mastering Spanish, French, and English. But when Hitler came to power membership in the Nazi Party became a prerequisite for aspirants to the foreign service, and he shifted to international law. Never a member of any political party (though after the war he once referred to himself as a quondam Socialist), he said his convictions were a blend of monarchism, old- fashioned liberalism, and anti-Nazism. He received the doctorate in law from Frankfurt University in 1935. By 1936 both John brothers were in Berlin. Hans was studying law at Berlin University. Otto served for two years without pay at Tempelhof Airdrome to qualify for final state law examinations in the service of Lufthansa. In 1937 he became assistant legal counsel, under Klaus Bonhoeffer, of the rapidly expanding civil airline. He was now in a position to do something positive about his anti-Nazi convictions. Through Klaus and his brother Dietrich, a Lutheran minister, he entered one of the circles that later were to band in the conspiracy against Hitler. An airline with routine flights into foreign countries was a convenient front for a conspiracy against a totalitarian regime.2 Klaus Bonhoeffer assigned Otto to several courier runs. When World War II broke in September 1939 Hans John went into the Luftwaffe as a lieutenant, but Otto remained with Lufthansa. That autumn he established connections with such anti-Nazis as the Social Democrat Wilhelm Leuschner and Col. General von Beck. Prince Louis Ferdinand, grandson of the Kaiser, had quit his job in a Ford plant in the United States to work for Lufthansa, and Otto John, along with Johannes Popitz, the Prussian Finance Minister, became a chief promoter of the Prince's pretensions to the throne in Carl Goerdeler's early schemes for a Hohenzollern restoration.3 Louis Lochner, former chief of the Berlin Bureau of the Associated Press, said that on several occasions he accompanied John to meetings in Berlin of the Goerdeler and Louis Ferdinand groups. Death was to sluff most of Otto's co-conspirators off the stage long before his own desertion, whether through natural causes, official executions, or the goon squads rampant at Germany's last gasp. But Louis Ferdinand remained a member of the cast through the last act. John cultivated him not only because he and his wife Kira, a former Grand Duchess of Russia, were very pleasant social companions but also because John, with his royalist inclinations, was flattered at being allowed to address the Prince by his intimate family nickname, "Lulu." Beyond these contacts with conspiracy and his flights to neutral countries, Otto's specific resistance activities during this early period are unknown. In 1941 he passed considerable classified information about the Luftwaffe to U.S. correspondent Lochner. Strained attempts have been made to link him a little later with Rote Kapelle, the Communist radio-espionage group active in Berlin in 1941-42. No evidence is available to support any such connection, although it has been taken for granted that his brother Hans had Communist affiliations. When eyebrows were raised over the appearance of the healthy Otto in mufti, he entered the Abwehr, likely on Goerdeler's sugestion and through the good offices of General Oster, the activist conspirator under Admiral Canaris. He was assigned to Abwehrstelle Stettin but told that his primary mission was to seek better surrender terms for Germany once Hitler was removed, using his Abwehr commission simply as cover. Threads linking the various opposition groups were now being slowly knit, and John probably provided liaison among those in the Abwehr, in the Army High Command, around Leuschner and Julius Leber, Louis Ferdinand, etc., whose heretofore diffuse activity was manifest in the ineffectual half-dozen different attempts to remove Hitler between 1939 and 1943. The year 1942 was eventful for him. He was using business trips to Madrid and Lisbon, ostensibly for the purpose of acquiring more Lufthansa runways, to re-establish resistance contacts with the British and try to activate the acquaintance between Prince Louis Ferdinand and President Roosevelt, who had once put the Prince up at Blair House. During this year he was turned in to the Gestapo by an aging and jealous prewar mistress, Frau Ameliess Pabst, and was rescued by his Abwehr connections.
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